At some point after midnight, the fan stopped. I heard my mother's door open, and her bare feet on the hall floor, and then the door to our room opened a crack and light from the hall fell across the floor in a long yellow stripe. She stood in the doorway. I kept my eyes almost closed and breathed slowly so she'd think I was asleep. She stood there for maybe a minute, looking at the bunk bed, or at the shoes lined up at the foot of it, or at the card standing like a tent on top of the black boots. I couldn't tell which. Then she pulled the door closed again, very gently, the way you close a door on a baby, and the stripe of light got thinner and thinner and went away.
Abuela's truck came around the corner at ten twenty-five Saturday morning. I heard it before I saw it. Gordo had a sound like nothing else on our street, a deep, uneven, satisfied rumble, like a big dog growling in its sleep, and Moxie started barking downstairs before the truck had even pulled to the curb. I was at the front window. I'd been at the front window since nine-thirty.
She parked with two tires up on the snowbank, the way she always parked, because she said the plows were run by idiots and she wasn't going to let one of them take off her side mirror. She climbed down from the cab, which took a while, because the cab was high and she was short and her knees were sixty-seven years old. She was wearing my grandfather's brown work jacket over a purple sweatshirt and black jeans, and work boots, and she had a knit cap pulled down over her gray hair. Under one arm she had a big brown accordion file, the kind with an elastic band around it, and in her other hand a white paper bag from the Mexican bakery on Broadway in Moses Lake. Pan dulce. She always brought pan dulce. And under the same arm as the file, flattened and folded, she had a piece of cardboard, which I didn't understand until later.
My mother was in the kitchen. She'd been up since six. She'd put on jeans and a nice sweater, a cream-colored one with a cowl neck that she wore to work on days she had to deal with Dr. Kemper's wife, and she'd done her makeup and put her hair up and taken it down and put it up again. She'd made a full pot of coffee in the real coffeemaker, not the instant she usually drank on weekends. The three shoe boxes were stacked on top of the refrigerator, where she'd put them Thursday, the red-swoosh box on the bottom, the tall boot box in the middle, the flat black box on top. She hadn't thrown them away. Sadie wouldn't let her. Sadie kept the boxes of everything.
Abuela came up the outside stairs one at a time, slowly, holding the rail. I opened the door before she knocked. She stopped on the landing and looked up at me, and her whole face went soft, and she said, "No-eh-mee," with all the vowels, and set the bakery bag on the railing and put both arms around me, accordion file and cardboard and all. She smelled like cinnamon gum and cold air and the inside of Gordo, which smelled like motor oil and the pine tree air freshener she'd had hanging from the mirror since I was born.
"You got taller," she said into my shoulder. "Stop it."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder." She let go and held me at arm's length and looked me over, top to bottom, the way she looked over a bus that had come into the barn limping. Her eyes stopped at my feet. I had on my gray sneakers. I'd taken the tape off that morning and put fresh tape on, very neatly, because I didn't want her to see it messy. That had seemed important at seven a.m.
She didn't say anything about it. She just picked up the pan dulce and said, "Where's your mother," and walked past me into the apartment.
"Connie," my mother said from the kitchen. She came out drying her hands on a dish towel, though her hands were already dry. "You made good time."
"I always make good time," Abuela said. "Gordo doesn't know how to make bad time." She held out the bakery bag. "Conchas. And two of the pig ones for Sadie."